The Second Generation of New York School Poets

The New York School of Poetry leaped into the North American literary scene in the 1950s and early 1960s. Some of the leading writers of that school were Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. 

Writers from the first generation of New York School Poets (left to right:)
Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler

Ted Berrigan, a successor to those poets, pointed out that the New York School didn’t have a program or a manifesto, unlike other literary movements, such as Dadaism or Surrealism. What united the New York School poets was what they loved: spontaneity, urban and pop culture, and jagged juxtapositions of conversational and formal speech that often made a reader grin:

I had just finished the last chapter of my biography of the

Buddha, The Yoghurt and the Revolution, and I was GLAD to eat.

It was raining

your letter never arrived

    I opened it, though… 

 

—Frank O’Hara, “The Lunch Hour FYI”

That lighthearted, casual irreverence of the New York School contrasted sharply with the stuffy, often rhymed poetry that was common in wainscoted university English departments in the 1950s and early 1960s in the U.S.A.

In one sense, the trajectory of the New York School of poets was similar to many avant-gardes in the arts. 

It’s often not the founders of an artistic movement who make the best use of their own innovations, but the second generation or the fellow travelers who add emotional depth to a new style. Think of the Surrealist movement in France. The Surrealist Manifestos advocated for automatic writing, a method of purely spontaneous composition that didn’t allow for planning or editing. That Surrealist doctrine unearthed the dazzling imagery of the unconscious, but it didn’t leave much space for in-depth feeling. It wasn’t the creators of the Surrealist style who actually made the most of their aesthetic, but the poets who blended the hallucinatory images of automatic writing with deep emotion: Pablo Neruda, Robert Desnos, Federico García Lorca, and Joyce Mansour, for example. 

The New York School of Poetry followed a similar path. The first generation (Ashbery, O’Hara, etc.) showed that conversational language, humor, and collage could create fun and poignant effects. But toeing the Modernist party line often kept those poets from expressing emotion in a way that transcended fragmentary collage or glib, prosy diction.

The next wave of writers of the New York School went in two opposite directions. One group went even further toward fragmentation (the “Language poets” and their circle) and/or prosy diction (the East Village poets in the orbit of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bouwerie). 

Personally, I’m more interested in a different group of poets who spun off from the New York School, the ones who took a more narrative turn. Those writers were influenced by the informal tone of the New York School and their embrace of pop culture, but they heightened the story or journal-like elements in that style. That group developed partly out of what Frank O’Hara called his “I do this, I do that” poems, works like his masterpiece, “The Day Lady Died,” that were almost a poetic diary. The more narrative group of second generation poets was also pulled in the direction of stand-up comedy—like poetry, stand-up involves a solo performer in front of an audience talking about personal topics, and stand-up evolved in New York. 

Those more narrative heirs of the New York School included Bill Zavatsky, Edward Field, Robert Hershon, and Alan Feldman (though he ultimately left the Big Apple for New England). To my mind, that second generation also includes women writers like Joan Larkin and Enid Dame, whose legacy can also be traced through feminist poetry. I’m using the term New York School loosely here, gathering under that wide roof a variety of writers in New York in the 1970s and 80s who were influenced by the first generation of the New York School.

Writers from the second generation of New York School Poets (left to right:)
Bill Zavatsky, Edward Field, Robert Hershon, Alan Feldman, Joan Larkin, Enid Dame

The second generation of New York School writers recounted experiences from daily life, but clayed them into a story or a theme, with compressed or imaginative diction that added the poet’s touch. Here’s an example:

 

Edward Field

The Statue of Liberty

All the ships are sailing away without me.

Day after day I hear their horns announcing

To the wage earners at their desks

That it is too late to get aboard.

They steam out of the harbor

With the statue of a French woman waving them good-by

Who used to be excellent to welcome people with

But is better lately for departures.

The French gave her to us as a reminder

Of their slogan and our creed

Which hasn’t done much good

Because we have turned a perfectly good wilderness

Into a place nice to visit but not to live in.

Forever a prisoner in the harbor

On her star-shaped island of gray stones

She has turned moldy-looking and shapeless

And her bronze drapery stands oddly in the wind.

From this prison-like island

I watch the ships sailing away without me

Disappearing one by one, day after day,

Into the unamerican distance,

And in my belly is one sentence: Set Freedom Free,

As the years fasten me into place and attitude,

Hand upraised and face into the wind

That no longer brings tears to my eyes. 

Amazingly, Edward Field published this prophetic poem in 1963 (in his collection Stand up, Friend, with Me). It’s a New York School poem not only because of its setting, but because it sandwiches popular culture, quotidian life, and a sophisticated viewpoint. The speaker expresses the thought that the ideals of American and French freedom have faded in the current era. I love the idea that the Statue of Liberty is a French woman. I also admire the ending, where the speaker is no longer even able to shed tears for the foregone loss of nature and freedom in his homeland. Edward Field uses the word “unamerican,” a reference to the House Un-American Activities Committee of the U.S. Congress, which was then conducting a witch-hunt into left-wing movements (sound familiar?). But the poet disarms the word “unamerican” by depriving it of its capital letters and by satirically using it to describe anywhere outside the United States. The “star-shaped island” suggests the stars in the U.S. flag, but also Hollywood stars, who became icons of another kind of liberty. With all those touches, Edward Field gave this poem heart and complexity. 

One thing I appreciate about Edward Field’s “The Statue of Liberty” is that it shows how the second generation of New York School poets transformed the first generation’s aesthetic. Many of the second generation of New York School poets deepened the movement by adding to its breezy, direct diction by applying multiple layers of narrative, meaning, and emotion.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

The Motown Last Dollar Choice and What It Means for Writers

Not long ago I was fortunate enough to visit the Motown Museum in Detroit, also called Hitsville U.S.A.

The Motown Museum, Detroit

At the end of the guided tour through the museum, I got to stand in Studio A, where a huge number of the greatest songs of the last half century were recorded (photo below).

These songs included hits sung by Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Martha and the Vandelas, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye…the list goes on and on. So many of these incredibly talented artists were all living in Detroit at the same time in the mid- and late-1960s. That period reminds me of Florence during the Renaissance—Motown Records brought together that sort of concentration of artistic genius all in one place and time.

Our tour guide, Cecilia (the liveliest tour guide ever!),  told us an intriguing story about a decision-making strategy that Motown Records used at its height, a method that I think has important implications for writers. Every Friday morning, the entire Motown community—recording artists, executives, and staff would sit down for a weekly meeting. They would play the tapes of the songs that the singers and musicians had recorded that week and they would ask themselves as a group one key question about that song:

If you were down to your last dollar, would you buy this record or would you buy a sandwich?

If the answer was the record, they would release it. If the answer was the sandwich, it was back to the studio to continue working.

There is something refreshing and honest about this standard. It cuts through a lot of the pretention and gimickry that often plagues the arts.

I wonder how many poets and writers would be willing to subject their work to a similar metric? As a poet, I think there are all-too-many poems that could never in a million years hope to approach that standard. Are there any poems that could reach that bar?

I think there are some poems that are more nourishing to the soul than a sandwich would be to the body. I have my own list (see below), but that list would be different for each person.

I wonder how often we challenge ourselves to write a poem or other work of literature that would reach that bar, and whether we even should? I do think there are poems that contain such an important life lesson, and/or use language in such a beautiful and succinct way, that I would pick them over a pesto chicken panini on an empty stomach.

I think few of us attempt to write in a way that is so universal and compelling because we are distracted by our own stories, our experiments with language, and our own preoccupations. There is also the danger of writing in a way that ends up being corny, or sententious, and those are unpardonable sins in contemporary art. We are so obsessed with authenticity and originality. I think we should be more tolerant of writers who err on the side of being preachy or schmaltzy, because they should be given credit for making the attempt at creating a poem that someone would pick over a sandwich. Academic criticism can be unforgiving of a writer such as Mary Oliver, who can go over the top with her Buddhist life-lesson poems collected in walks in the woods, but I salute her for trying to say something deep and universal, even if she only succeeds some of the time.

Here are the poems that come to my mind as reaching the poem-over-sandwich bar:

Yehuda Amichai, “The Precision of Pain”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning “How do I love thee…” (Sonnets from the Portuguese #43)

William Blake “The Tyger”

Chana Bloch “The Joins”

André Breton “Always for the first time” from The Air of the Water

Robert Desnos “No, Love Is Not Dead”

John Donne “No man is an island…” (Meditation XVII)

T.S. Eliot “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Hollow Men”

Faiz Ahmed Faiz “Don’t Ask for Me for That Love Again”

Tess Gallagher “Each Bird Walking”

Federico García Lorca “Sleepwalking Ballad” (or “Somnambule Ballad”) and “Gacela of Unforeseen Love”

Allen Ginsberg “America”

June Jordan “On a New Year’s Eve”

Robert Hass “Meditation at Lagunitas”

Nazim Hikmet: “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved,” “On Living,” “Bor Hotel”

Langston Hughes “Mother to Son”

John Keats “To Autumn,” “Bright Star,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Czeslaw Milosz “Bypassing Rue Descartes,” “Song on the End of the World”

Pablo Neruda “Gentleman without Company”

Mary Oliver “In Blackwater Woods”

Frank Paino “Each Bone of the Body”

Edgar Allen Poe “Annabel Lee” and “The Raven”

Kenneth Rexroth, tanka translated in One Hundred Poems from the Japanese

Rainer Maria Rilke “Archaic Torso of Apollo” and “If only once it would be completely still…”

William Shakespeare “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” (Sonnet 18) “Let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment” (Sonnet 116)

Ntozake Shange “one” (“orange butterflies and aqua sequins”)

William Stafford “Travelling Through the Dark”

Edna St. Vincent Millay “Figs from Thistles: First Fig” (“My candle burns at both ends…”) and “What lips my lips have kissed and where, and why”

Wislawa Szymborska “True Love”

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

William Wordsworth “The World Is Too Much with Us” and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”

W.B. Yeats “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”

Yosano Akiko, various tanka from Midaregami, including “tell me this evening as you gaze eastward…,” “my hands cover my breasts…,” “early evening moon rising over a field of flowers…”

Bill Zavatsky “Live at the Village Vanguard”

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry